Teenagers don’t
have the best reputation. They’re often called reckless and immature or written
off as self-obsessed adult-haters. But as neuropsychiatrist Daniel Siegel
watched his own kids make their way through adolescence, something occurred to him:
This was nothing like all those pop-culture stereotypes.

When he couldn’t find a book written
for adolescents about the changes happening in their brains, Siegel decided to
write his own. He began looking into the science behind the teenage brain and “I
was shocked to find the disparity between what science was saying and what
popular views of adolescence are,” he says. “Then I thought, maybe this book
should be for adults, too.”

The result was Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain, which will
be released later this month and is aimed at both teenage and adult readers. Several
weeks before its publication date, the book was already ranked the second highest-selling
book in Amazon’s parenting-of-teenagers subcategory — but Siegel is no stranger
to bestsellers. A psychiatry professor at the UCLA School of Medicine, he has already
written several of them, including The
Developing Mind and The Whole-Brain
Child.

He recently spoke with us about the brain
during adolescence — a period that spans ages 12 to 24 — and explained why he says,
with complete confidence, that “the reason we’ve populated every aspect of the
planet is because of the courage of adolescents.”

Taking the second half of your subtitle
first: What is the purpose of the teenage brain?

Dr. Dan Siegel (James Reese)Going from the
dependency of childhood to the responsibility of adulthood requires not just a
leap, but a transformation. The brain needs a transformative time to prepare
for that. At a species level, for us to adapt to everyone on the planet, you
can’t just accept what the current adult population has learned and transmitted
to you in your childhood. You’ve got to push away from that and start thinking
in new ways. For the individual, at a very basic level, there need to be
changes in the brain that allow you to leave home and start changing out the
combinations of genes so we diversify the gene pool. If you remain in the role
of dependent child, you’ll never figure out how to approach dangers and
challenges while you’re doing all this. It’s a time where you have to court
danger and take risks so you’re ready for adulthood.

In Brainstorm
you talk about four major aspects of the teenage brain, all of which seem geared
toward those broader purposes. What are those aspects?

I love acronyms,
and I call this one ESSENCE. ES is emotional
spark. The lower parts of the nervous system rise up and affect the higher
part of the brain — the cortex — which gives us this passion and vitality. The SE
is social engagement. The brain is literally programmed to start having you
turn to your peers rather than your parents and engage socially with your peer
group. The brain’s change in dopamine drives you to experience novelty [N] as very rewarding, and that allows
you to go out and take risks. And CE is creative
expression. The brain is achieving new levels of complexity that open the
mind up to creatively exploring the nature of reality in a new way.

Digging into that last one, you write
that adolescence is “a golden age for innovation” and “the gateway to creative
thinking.” Why is that?

When adolescence
comes, we’re programmed from an evolutionary point of view to push away from
the status quo. In concrete terms, we push away from our parents and parent
figures. But from a more abstract sense, we start imagining the worlds that
don’t quite exist yet. Those are the sources of creativity: this push against
what exists to not only think out of the box but to actually re-imagine the
world. If you look at the data even in science, which is a hard field, a lot of
the new ideas come from people in their adolescence. That’s true in art and
music, too, and obviously in technology.

How does ESSENCE apply to adults? Is it
something we can hold on to through life, or at least reclaim now that we know about it?

The ESSENCE of
adolescence is something you don’t ever have to let go of, but if you have and
now you need to reclaim it, there are things you can do. To get your emotional
spark back, I would suggest using mind-training practices to enhance your awareness
of non-verbal signals that arise from your body. You also get used to the
familiar and the routine as an adult. To bring back novelty, simply try new
things; introduce new things into your life on purpose.

You also write that it’s inaccurate to
dismiss adolescents as simply impulsive. In fact, you say that they can
actually be too rational when making
risky decisions.

The research
term is hyper-rational thinking. It’s
related to the idea that the appraisal centers of your brain highlight and emphasize and amplify the meaning and significance and
import of a positive aspect of an experience. If I’m going to drive a car 100
miles an hour, it would be how thrilling that will be. The potential cons — I
could crash into a tree, I could kill someone, I could kill myself — are minimized.
When you hyper-rationally do your calculation, you say that the chances are very
likely everything will be fine. There may be a five percent chance I’ll crash
but a 95 percent chance I won’t. Sadly, the hyper-rational thinking accurately assess
probabilities, but it de-emphasizes the severity of the negative outcome, simply
because there’s only a slight chance it will happen.

What are some of the other major myths you
discovered about adolescence?

One is that to
grow up, adolescents need to be totally independent of adults. In fact, adolescents
need adults in their lives. We don’t have much in the structure of modern
society that provides trusted, non-parental adult figures that the adolescent —
whose brain is naturally pushing away from parent figures — can turn to during this transformative period of life. We need to rethink that as a society.

I also disagree
with the belief that adolescence is this horrible time of life that you just
have to get through. I think the courage to creatively explore the world is an
untapped resource for humanity. If we don’t work together to solve some of the
world’s most pressing problems with the help of adolescent minds, then we’re
not going to do so well.

Is there something that still puzzles you
about the teenage brain, even after writing a book about it?

So many things! Mostly
there are fundamental questions about how we can reach individuals entering the
adolescent period to minimize danger to themselves or others. We need to really
think deeply about how to develop communities of support for teens.